Babalou hotel for sick children one stage nearer to completion

As reported last summer, a hotel for children with special medical needs providing care, and also accommodation for their parents and siblings, is to be built on the former St Anna site in Unterägeri. Now formal permission for the hotel, to be known as Babalou, is to be handed in to the authorities. When complete in two-and-a-half to three years’ time (see computer-generated photograph), it will be one of only a very few of its kind in the whole of German-speaking Europe.
 
Hugo Berchtold, the chairman of the board of the St Anna Foundation, one of three bodies working together on the project, said he was delighted with progress so far. The other two bodies involved are the Bonainvest Holding company of Solothurn and the Casalife Annahof AG company, which will run it.
 
There is actually a long tradition of this sort of care being provided in the Aegeri Valley, with a children’s recuperative centre having been established on this site in 1881.
 
According to statistics, there is at least one child who needs special care of some kind, as a result of their being mentally or physically handicapped, or being seriously ill in another way, or in need of a period of convalescence after an operation, in as many as 10% of families in Switzerland.
 
It is at this new hotel that the affected child will be able to be given the care it needs, with parents and healthy brothers and sisters able to stay with them at the same time, too. Martin Lohr, the managing director of the St Anna Foundation, mentioned how cooperation with providers of recreational facilities in the area, be it skiing, mini-golf or other activities connected with the lake, is being sought, too.
 
The children with special needs would be provided with 24-hour care service if necessary, for example through the Kinderspitex service, similar to the one which provides care for those who need it in their own homes. Then there would also be a paediatric medical service, open to local children, too, not just those at the hotel.
 
Parents with children who need special care often face additional financial problems, too. In order to provide the funds needed, the Pro Valere Foundation is being set up on a national basis to provide funding for parents affected, and not just for those staying at the Babalou in Unterägeri.
 
It is on this same site that there are already 31 old people’s flats and an additional 13 for those needing care will be housed on the upper floors of the hotel. It is here also where there will be a restaurant and function room able to be hired out for private use.
 
Three further separate buildings will provide 27 three-to-five-room flats on the same site, with residents able to enjoy services such as cleaning, laundering, chauffeuring and help in administrative matters, all part of a package offered by the Bonacasa Service System run by the afore-mentioned Bonainvest Holding company, which provides serviced accommodation of this type in as many as 1,500 apartments across the country.
Once complete, the St Anna name originally given to the site will become known as “am Baumgärtli” (on the little arboretum).
 
The mayor of Unterägeri, Josef Ribary, said how delighted he was that all was coming together on the project, with the whole community able to benefit, not least because of the 50 new jobs it will create. “The very presence of the complex will lead to a definite enhancement of the whole Aegeri Valley,” he said.